Telephone call-centers are widely used in nearly all industries. These call-centers typically provide some form of customer service. The customer service being provided may include technical support, taking and processing orders, processing reservations, confirming the status of a product, etc. Although call-centers can be effective in providing customer service, there is a tension between providing effective call-center based service and the associated costs. Live agents generally provide the most accurate and comprehensive service to callers, however, staffing a sufficient number of live agents to handle a high-volume of calls can be cost-prohibitive. Therefore, in order to handle a high volume of calls and avoid the costs associated with having a sufficient number of live agents, many companies have supplemented, or replaced, live agents with automated interactive voice response (“IVR”) applications or systems.
IVR systems may use a speech recognition engine, a voice synthesizer engine, and a computing device running voice extensible markup language (“VXML”) browser and scripts. The typical IVR systems can be effective in handling calls that are limited to simple dialogue. These calls include calls where a caller's utterances are generally contained within a clearly defined set of possible utterances. Examples of such calls include calls where the questions require either a “yes” or “no” answer, or calls that request information that is exclusively numerical, etc. IVR systems have proven ineffective at handling more complex call dialogues where a caller's utterance is not necessarily contained within a clearly defined set of utterances. Calls that ask open-ended questions, or require more detailed and unique information such as a mailing address, an electronic mail (“email”) address, or even a caller's name can be difficult for current IVR systems to process accurately and efficiently. In these situations, existing IVR systems often misunderstand the caller's utterances. This generally results in wasted time, and the call being routed to a live agent for proper handling, raising costs for call processing and increasing wait times and frustration levels for callers.